Venezuela Introduces Food, Water, and Electricity Rationing

Socialism and botched economic policies (controlled economy), lead to rationing. For individuals, and nations, poverty is the affliction. Free enterprise is the cure.

Some 6 million people in Venezuela’s capital may have to go three days a week without water after authorities began implementing a rationing plan on Wednesday.

The government said the emergency plan in Caracas is needed to confront the crippling drought that has brought the water level at Lagartijo reservoir down to near record lows, the Associated Press reported Thursday. But opponents of the socialist government are blaming President Nicolas Maduro for failing to implement a plan months ago. Carlos Ocariz, mayor of the capital’s Sucre district, said there hasn’t been a single reservoir built during 15 years of socialist rule.

The government will also start rationing electricity in western Zulia state, one day after Ford Motor Co. halted production in the country.

Venezuela has also introduced a new food card that critics decry as a Cuban-style rationing policy that will not alleviate the country’s economic problems, Reuters reports.

Maduro has touted the “Secure Food Supply” card as a measure that will combat hoarding and reselling by Venezuelans. Some shoppers buy heavily subsidized food products and then resell them on the black market or over the border in Colombia for large profits:

“If there are shortages, there needs to be rationing to make sure we can all get the products we need,” said doctor Yusmery Palacios, 36, in a line at a state-run supermarket in Caracas.

How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the Gospel of Peace.

- Isaiah 52:7 & Romans 10:15

We must be super-conservative in preserving the Orthodox faith, and super-modern in propagating it.

- St. Nikolai Velimirovich

But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.